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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 







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GARRISON: 



AN OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE 



BV 



OLIVER JOHNSON 



3.QX 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1879 









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Copyright, 1879, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Trow's 

Printing and Bookbinding Co., 

205-213 East 12th, St., 

NEW YORK. 



GARRISON 



William Lloyd Garrisox, the founder 
and leader of the movement for the abolition 
of slavery in the United States of America, was 
born in Xewburyport. Massachusetts, Decem- 
ber io, 1805. His parents were from the British 
Province of New Brunswick. The father, a sea- 
captain, went away from home when William was 
a child, and it is not known whether he died at 
sea or on the land. The mother is said to have 
been a woman of high character, charming in 
person, and eminent for piety. For her William 
had the deepest reverence, and he is supposed 
to have inherited from her the moral qualities ^ 
that specially fitted him for his career. She was 
entirely dependent for the support of herself and 
children upon her labors as a nurse. She was 
able to give William but a meagre chance for 
acquiring an education, but he had a taste for 
books, and made the most of his limited opportu- 



4 GARRISON. 

nities. She first set him to learn the trade of ; 
shoemaker, and, when she found this did not sui 
him , let him try his hand at cabinet-making. Bu 
the latter pleased him no better than the former 
In October, 1818, however, when he was in hi 
fourteenth year, he was made more than conten 
by being indentured to Ephraim W. Allen, pro 
prietor of " The Newburyport Herald," to lean 
the trade of a printer. He found in this occu 
pation a happy stimulus to his literary taste an< 
ambition, as well as some available opportuni 
ties for mental culture. Pie soon became a; 
expert compositor, and after a time began h 
write anonymously for the " Herald." His com 
munications won the commendation of the edi 
tor, who had not at first the slightest suspicio: 
that he was the author. He also wrote fo 
other papers with equal success. A series c 
political essays, written by him for the " Saler 
Gazette," was copied by a prominent Philadel 
phia journal, the editor of which attributed then 
to the Hon. Timothy Pickering, a distinguishe* 
statesman of Massachusetts. His skill as i 
printer won for him the position of foreman 
while his ability as a writer was so marked tha 
the editor of the " Herald," when temporaril; 



GARRISON. 5; 

called away from his post, left the paper in his 
charge. 

The printing-office was for him, what it has 
been for many another poor boy, no mean sub- 
stitute for the academy and the college. He 
was full of enthusiasm for liberty ;• the struggle 
of the Greeks to throw off the Turkish yoke en- 
listed his warmest sympathy, and at one time he 
seriously thought of entering the West Point 
Academy and fitting himself for a soldier's ca- 
reer. His apprenticeship ended with his minor- 
ity in 1826, when he began the publication of a 
new paper, the " Free Press," in his native 
place. This paper was full of spirit and intel- 
lectual force, but Newburyport was a sleepy 
place and did not appreciate a periodical so fresh 
and free ; and so the enterprise failed. Mr. 
Garrison then went to Boston, where, after 
working for a time as a journeyman printer, he 
became the editor of the " National Philanthro- 
pist," the first journal established in America to 
promote the cause of total abstinence from in- 
toxicating liquors. His work in this paper was 
highly appreciated by the friends of temperance, 
but a change in the proprietorship led to his 
withdrawal before the end of a year. In 1828 



6 GARRISON. 

he was induced to establish the " Journal of the 
Times " at Bennington, Vermont, to support 
the re-election to the Presidency of the United 
States of John Quincy Adams. The new paper, 
though attractive in many ways, and full of force 
and fire, was too far ahead of public sentiment 
on moral questions to win a large support. 
Whether or not it would have lived if he had 
continued to be its editor, it is impossible to 
say ; but the time had come at last when he was 
to enter upon the work with which his name 
will be forever associated. In Boston he had 
met Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker philanthropist, 
who had been for years engaged in an effort to 
convince the people of the United States that 
they ought to do something to promote the 
abolition of slavery. Mr. Garrison had been 
deeply moved by Mr. Lundy's appeals, and 
after going to Vermont he showed the deepest 
interest in the slavery question. Mr. Lundy 
was then publishing in Baltimore a small month- 
ly paper, entitled " Genius of Universal Eman- 
cipation," and he resolved to go to Bennington 
and invite Mr. Garrison to join him in the edi- 
torship. With this object in view he walked 
from Boston to Bennington, through the frost 



GARRISON. 7 

and snow of a New England winter, a distance 
of 125 miles. His mission was successful. Mr. 
Garrison was deeply impressed by the good 
Quaker's zeal and devotion, and he resolved to 
join him and devote himself thereafter to the 
work of abolishing slavery. 

In pursuance of this plan he went to Balti- 
more in the autumn of 1829, and thenceforth the 
" Genius " was published weekly, under the 
joint editorship of the two men. It was under- 
stood, however, that Mr. Garrison would do 
most of the editorial work, while Mr. Lundy 
would spend most of his time in lecturing and 
procuring subscribers. On one point the two 
editors differed radically, Lundy being the ad- 
vocate of gradual, and Garrison the champion 
of immediate, emancipation. The former was 
possessed by the idea that the negroes, on be- 
ing emancipated, must be colonized somewhere 
beyond the limits of the United States ; the 
latter held that they should be emancipated on 
the soil of the country, with all the rights of 
freemen. In view of this difference it was 
agreed that each should speak on his own in- 
dividual responsibility in the paper, appending 
his initial to each of his articles for the informa- 



8 GARRISON. 

tion of the reader. It deserves mention here 
that Mr. Garrison was then in utter ignorance 
of the change previously wrought in the opinions 
of English abolitionists by Elizabeth Heyrick's 
pamphlet in favor of immediate, in distinction 
from gradual emancipation. The sinfulness of 
slavery being admitted, the duty of immediate 
emancipation to his clear ethical instinct was 
perfectly manifest. He saw that it would be 
idle to expose and denounce the evils of slavery,, 
while responsibility for the system was placed 
upon former generations, and the duty of abol- 
ishing it transferred to an indefinite future. His 
demand for immediate emancipation fell like a 
tocsin upon the ears of slaveholders. For gen- 
eral talk about the evils of slavery they cared 
little, but this assertion that every slave was en- 
titled to instant freedom filled them with alarm 
and roused them to anger, for they saw that, if 
the conscience of the nation were to respond to 
the proposition, the system must inevitably fall. 
The " Genius," now that it had become a ve- 
hicle for this dangerous doctrine, was a paper 
to be feared and intensely hated. Baltimore 
was then one of the centres of the domestic 
slave trade, and upon this traffic Mr. Garrison 



GARRISON. 9 

heaped the strongest denunciations. A vessel 
owned in Newburyport having taken a cargo of 
slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans, he char- 
acterized the transaction as an act of " domestic 
piracy," and avowed his purpose to " cover 
with thick infamy " those engaged therein. He 
was thereupon prosecuted for libel by the owner 
of the vessel, fined in the sum of fifty dollars, 
mulcted in costs of court, and, in default of pay- 
ment, committed to jail. His imprisonment 
created much excitement, and in some quarters, 
in spite of the pro-slavery spirit of the time, 
was a subject of indignant comment in public 
as well as private. The excitement was fed by 
the publication of two or three striking sonnets, 
instinct with the spirit of liberty, which Mr. 
Garrison inscribed on the walls of his cell. One 
of these, " Freedom of Mind," is remarkable for 
freshness of thought and terseness of expression, 
and will probably hold a permanent place in 
American literature. 

John G. Whittier, the Quaker poet, inter- 
ceded with Henry Clay to pay Mr. Garrison's 
fine and thus release him from prison. To the 
credit of the slaveholding statesman, it must be 
said that he responded favorably, but before he 



10 GARRISON. 

had time for the requisite preliminaries, Mr. 
Arthur Tappan, a philanthropic merchant of 
New York, contributed the necessary sum and 
set the prisoner free after an incarceration of 
seven weeks. The partnership between Mr. 
Garrison and Mr. Lundy was then dissolved by 
mutual consent, and the former resolved to es- 
tablish a paper of his own, in which, upon his 
sole responsibility, he could advocate the doc- 
trine of immediate emancipation and oppose 
the scheme of African colonization. He was 
sure, after his experiences at Baltimore, that a 
movement against slavery resting upon any less 
radical foundation than this would be ineffica- 
cious. He first proposed to establish his paper 
at Washington, in the midst of slavery, but on 
returning to New England and observing the 
state of public opinion there, he came to the 
conclusion that little could be done at the South 
while the non-slaveholding North was lending 
her influence, through political, commercial, re- 
ligious, and social channels, for the sustenance 
of slavery. He determined, therefore, to pub- 
lish his paper in Boston, and, having issued his 
prospectus, set himself to the task of awakening 
an interest in the subject by means of lectures 



GARRISON. II 

in some of the principal cities and towns of the 
North. It was an up-hill work. Contempt for 
the negro and indifference to his wrongs were 
almost universal. In Boston, then a great cot- 
ton mart, he tried in vain to procure a church 
or vestry for the delivery of his lectures, and 
thereupon announced in one of the daily jour- 
nals that if some suitable place was not promptly 
offered he would speak on the Common. A 
body of infidels proffered him the use of their 
small hall, and, no other place being accessible, 
he accepted it gratefully, and delivered therein 
three lectures, in which he unfolded his princi- 
ples and plans. He visited, privately, many of 
the leading citizens of the city, statesmen, di- 
vines, and merchants, and besought them to 
take the lead in a national movement against 
slavery ; but they all with one consent made 
excuse, some of them listening to his plea with 
manifest impatience. He was disappointed, but 
not disheartened. His conviction of the right- 
eousness of his cause, of the evils and dangers 
of slavery, and of the absolute necessity of the 
contemplated movement, was intensified by op- 
position, and he resolved to go forward, trusting 
in God for success. 



12 GARRISON. 

On the first of January, 1831, without a dol- 
lar of capital save in hand and brain, and with- 
out a single subscriber, he and his partner is- 
sued the first number of " The Liberator/' 
avowing their " determination to print it as 
long as they could subsist on bread and water, 
or their hands obtain employment." Its motto 
was, " Our Country is the World — our Coun- 
trymen are Mankind ; " and the editor, in his 
address to the public, uttered the words which 
have become memorable as embodying the 
.whole purpose and spirit of his life : — " I am in 
earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not ex- 
cuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I 
will be heard." Help came but slowly. For 
many months Mr. Garrison, and his brave part- 
ner, Mr. Isaac Knapp, who died long before 
the end of the conflict, made their bed on the 
floor of the room, ''dark, unfurnitured and 
mean," in which they printed their paper, and 
where the Mayor of Boston, in compliance with 
the request of a distinguished magistrate of the 
South, "ferreted them out," in "an obscure 
hole," "their only visible auxiliary a negro 
boy." But the paper founded under such in- 
auspicious circumstances exerted a mighty in- 



GARRISON. 13 

fluence, and lived to record not only President 
Lincoln's proclamation of emancipation, but 
the adoption of an amendment to the Constitu- 
tion of the United States forever prohibiting 
slavery. It was the beginning and the nucleus 
of an agitation that eventually pervaded and 
filled every part of the country, and that baffled 
alike the wiles of politicians and parties, and 
the devices of those pulpits and ecclesiastical 
bodies which forgot that Jesu* came to preach 
deliverance to the captives and the opening of 
the prison to them that are bound. Other 
newspapers were afterwards established upon 
the same principles ; anti-slavery societies, 
founded upon the doctrine of immediate emanci- 
pation, sprang up on every hand ; the agita- 
tion was carried into political parties, into the 
press, and into legislative and ecclesiastical 
assemblies; until, in i860, the Southern States, 
taking alarm from the election of a President 
known to be at heart opposed to slavery though 
pledged to enforce all the constitutional safe- 
guards of the system, seceded from the Union 
and set up a separate government. In the 
struggle that ensued slavery was abolished by 
an exercise of the powers of war, as a necessary 
means of restoring the Union. 



14 GARRISON. 

Mr. Garrison sought the abolition of slavery 
by moral means alone. He knew that the Na- 
tional Government had no power over the sys- 
tem in any State, though it could abolish it at 
the National Capital, and prohibit it in the in- 
choate States called Territories. He thought 
it should, by the exercise of such limited pow- 
ers as it possessed, bring its moral influence to 
bear in favor of abolition ; but neither he nor 
his associates ever asked Congress to exercise 
any unconstitutional power. His idea was to 
combine the moral influence of the North, and 
pour it through every open channel upon the 
South. To this end he made his appeal to the 
Northern churches and pulpits, beseeching them 
to bring the power of Christianity to bear 
against the slave system, and to advocate the 
right of the slaves to immediate and uncondi- 
tional freedom. He thought that, under the mo- 
ral pressure thus created, and which would be 
re-enforced by the civilization and Christianity 
of the foremost nations of the world, the South 
would speedily give way and proclaim freedom 
to her bondmen. He was a man of peace, hat- 
ing war not less than he did slavery ; but he 
warned his countrymen that if they refused to 



GARRISON. 15 

abolish slavery by moral power a retributive 
war must sooner or later ensue. The conflict 
was irrepressible. Slavery must be overthrown, 
if not by peaceful means, then in blood. The 
first society organized under Mr. Garrison's aus- 
pices, and in accordance with his principles, was 
the " New England Anti-Slavery Society," which 
adopted its Constitution in January, 1832. 
In the spring of this year Mr. Garrison issued 
his work entitled " Thoughts on African Coloni- 
zation," in which he showed by ample citations 
from official documents that the American Col- 
onization Society was organized in the interest 
of slavery, and that in offering itself to the peo- 
ple of the North as a practical remedy for that 
system it was guilty of deception. His book 
smote the Society with a paralysis from which 
it has never recovered. Agents of the Ameri- 
can Colonization Society in England having suc- 
ceeded in deceiving leading abolitionists there as 
to the character and tendency of that Society, 
Mr. Garrison was deputed by the New England 
Anti-Slavery Society to visit that country for 
the purpose of counteracting their influence. 
He went in the spring of 1833, when he was but 
twenty-seven years of age, and was received 



l6 GARRISON. 

with great cordiality by British abolitionists, 
some of whom had heard of his bold assaults 
upon American slavery, and seen a few numbers 
of " The Liberator." The struggle for emanci- 
pation in the West Indies was then at the point 
of culmination ; the leaders of the cause, from 
all parts of the kingdom, were assembled in 
London, and Mr. Garrison was at once admitted 
to their councils and treated with distinguished 
consideration. He formed the acquaintance of 
Wilberforce, Clarkson, Buxton, O'Connell, 
George Thompson, and many others, and was 
greatly cheered by what he saw and heard. He 
was thoroughly successful in his efforts to unde- 
ceive the people of England in respect to the 
character and designs of the American Coloni- 
zation Society, and took home with him a " Pro- 
test " against it, signed by Wilberforce, Zachary 
Macaulay, Samuel Gurney, William Evans, 
S. Lushington, T. Fowell Buxton, James Crop- 
per, Daniel O'Connell, and others, in which 
they declared their deliberate judgment that 
" its precepts were delusive," and "its real 
effects of the most dangerous nature." He also 
received assurances of the cordial sympathy of 
British abolitionists with him in his efforts to 



GARRISON. 17 

abolish American slavery. He gained a hear- 
ing before a large, popular assembly in London, 
and won the confidence of those whom he ad- 
dressed by his evident earnestness, sincerity, 
and ability. 

Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, before he had 
an opportunity of meeting him, invited him to 
breakfast at his house. Mr. Garrison presented 
himself at the appointed time ; but Mr. Buxton, 
instead of coming forward promptly to take his 
hand, scrutinized him from head to foot, and 
then inquired, somewhat dubiously, " Have I 
the pleasure of addressing Mr. Garrison, of 
Boston, in the United States ? " Being an- 
swered in the affirmative, he lifted up his hands 
and exclaimed, "Why, my dear sir, I thought 
you were a black man, and I have consequently 
invited this company of ladies and gentlemen 
to be present to welcome Mr. Garrison, the 
black advocate of emancipation, from the United 
States of America." Mr. Garrison often said 
that, of all the compliments he ever received, 
this was the only one that he cared to remem- 
ber or repeat ; for Mr. Buxton had somehow 
or other supposed that no white American 
could plead for those in bondage as he had 

2 



1 8 GARRISON. 

done, and that therefore he must be black. 
Mr. Garrison's visit to England enraged the 
pro-slavery people and press of the United 
States at the outset, and when he returned 
home in September, with the " Protest " against 
the Colonization Society, and announced that 
he had engaged the services of George Thomp- 
son as a lecturer against American slavery, 
there were fresh outbursts of rage on every 
hand. The American Anti-Slavery Society 
was organized in December of that year, put- 
ting forth a masterly declaration of its princi- 
ples and purposes from the pen of Mr. -Garri- 
son. This added fresh fuel to the public excite- 
ment, and when Mr. Thompson came over in 
the next spring, the hostility to the cause began 
to manifest itself in mobs organized to suppress 
the discussion of the slavery question. Now 
began what Harriet Martineau called " the 
Martyr Age in America." Mr. Thompson 
gained a favorable hearing in a few places, but 
his appearance in any town or city became at 
length the signal of a mob, and in the fall of 
1835 he was compelled, in order to save his life, 
to embark secretly for England. Just before 
his departure, the announcement that he would 



GARRISON. 19 

address the Women's Anti-Slavery Society of 
Boston created "a mob of gentlemen of prop- 
erty and standing," from which, if he had been 
present, he could hardly have escaped with his 
life. The whole city was in an uproar. Mr. 
Garrison, almost denuded of his clothing, was 
dragged through the streets by infuriated men, 
with a rope around his body, by which they 
doubtless intended to hang him. He was res- 
cued with great difficulty and consigned to the 
jail for safety, until he could be secretly re- 
moved from the city. For two or three years 
these attempts to suppress the anti-slavery 
movement by violence were persisted in, but it 
was like attempting to extinguish a fire by pour- 
ing oil upon the flames, or like an effort to 
stop the roar of Niagara by increasing the vol- 
ume of its waters. 

Anti-slavery societies were greatly multiplied 
throughout the North, and many men of influ- 
ence, both in the Church and in the State, were 
won to the cause. Mr. Garrison, true to his 
original purpose, never faltered or turned back. 
Other friends of the cause were sometimes dis- 
couraged — he, never. The abolitionists of the 
United States were a united body until 1839-40 



20 GARRISON. 

when divisions sprang up among them. Mr. 
Garrison countenanced the activity of women 
in the cause, even to the extent of allowing 
them to vote and speak in the anti-slavery 
societies, and appointing them as lecturing 
agents. To this a strong party was opposed 
upon social and religious grounds. Then there 
were some who thought Mr. Garrison dealt too 
severely with the churches and pulpits for their 
complicity with slavery, and who accused him 
of a want of religious orthodoxy. He was, 
moreover, a non-resistant, and this, to many, 
was distasteful. The dissentients from his 
opinions determined to form an anti-slavery 
political party, while he believed in working by 
moral rather than political party instrumentali- 
ties. These differences led to the organization 
of a new National Anti-Slavery Society, in 
1840, and to the formation of the " Liberty 
Party " in politics. The two societies sent their 
delegates to the World's Anti-Slavery Conven- 
tion, in London, in 1840, and Mr. Garrison re- 
fused to take his seat in that body, because the 
women delegates from the United States were 
excluded. 

The discussions of the next few years served 



GARRISON. 21 

to make clearer than before the practical 
workings of the Constitution of the United 
States as a shield and support of slavery ; 
and Mr. Garrison, after long and painful re- 
flection, came to the conclusion that its pro- 
slavery clauses were immoral, and that it was 
therefore wrong to take an oath for its support. 
The Southern States had a greatly enlarged 
representation in Congress on account of their 
slaves, and the National Government was con- 
stitutionally bound to assist in the capture of 
fugitive slaves, and to suppress every attempt 
on their part to gain their freedom by force. 
In view of these provisions, Mr. Garrison, 
adopting a bold Scriptural figure of speech, de- 
nounced the Union as " a covenant with death 
and an agreement with hell," and adopted as 
his motto the legend, " No union with slave- 
holders." His argument on this question, in 
the light of ethical principles generally admitted 
to be sound, could not easily be answered, and 
many men, who shrank from the conclusion that 
followed therefrom, were held by it as in a vise. 
His exposures of the character and practical 
working of the pro-slavery clauses of the Con- 
stitution, in spite of the impatience with which 



22 GARRISON. 

they were regarded in some quarters, made a 
deep impression upon the national conscience, 
and served to abate that undiscriminating and 

idolatrous reverence for the Union, upon which 
the slave-holders had so long relied for the pro- 
tection of their system. 

One class of abolitionists sought to evade the 
difficulty by strained interpretations of the 
clauses referred to, while others, admitting that 
they were immoral, felt themselves obliged, 
notwithstanding, to support the Constitution 
in order to avoid what they thought would be 
still greater evils. The American Anti-Slav- 
ery Society, of which Mr. Garrison was the 
President from 1S43 to the day of emancipa- 
tion, was during all this period the nucleus of 
an intense and powerful moral agitation, which 
was greatly valued by the soundest and most 
faithful workers in the field of politics, who 
greatly respected him for his fidelity to his con- 
victions. On the other hand, Mr. Garrison 
always had the highest respect for every ear- 
nest and faithful opponent of slavery, however 
far he might be from adopting his special 
views. He was intolerant of nothing but con- 
scious treachery to the cause. When in 1861 the 



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24 GARRISON. 

gle to which his life was devoted. In 1865, at 
the close of the war, he declared that, slavery 
being abolished, his career as an abolitionist 
was ended. He counselled a dissolution of the 
American Anti-Slavery Society, insisting that 
it had become functus officiis, and that whatever 
needed to be done for the protection of the 
freedmen could best be accomplished by new 
associations formed for that purpose. " The 
Liberator" was discontinued at the end of the 
same year, after an existence of thirty-five 
years. He visited England for the second 
time in 1846, and again in 1867, when he was 
received with distinguished honors, public as 
well as private. In 1877, when he was there 
for the last time, he declined every form of 
public recognition. He died in New York, 
May 24, 1879, in the 74th year of his age, 
and was buried in Boston, after a most im- 
pressive funeral service, May 28th. In 1843 
a small volume of his " Sonnets and other 
Poems" was published, and in 1852 appeared 
a volume of " Selections " from his " Writings 
and Speeches." His wife, Helen Eliza Benson, 
died in 1876. Four sons and one daugl^ter sur- 
vive them. 



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